Mark Edmundson

There has been a lot of talk in the press recently about the role of athletes in our culture. Here at Wesleyan, about a quarter of our students play a varsity sport, and one shouldn’t make any generalizations about the variety of students who dedicate themselves to excellence in competition. The men’s and women’s tennis teams are off to strong starts, fueled by a combination of new talent and some seasoned players. The women’s volleyball team had a great tournament this weekend and hopes to build on that momentum. Claire Larson ’15 and Heidi Westerman ’17 kept the team humming. Women’s field hockey and soccer have had some tough early losses, but there were plenty of bright spots in their play that will help them keep improving. The men’s soccer team has started strong, and its great goalie Emmett McConnell ’15 has three shutouts in four starts!

One of the really exciting moments last year was the football team winning the Little Three for the first time in over forty years. They also shared the NESCAC crown. On Saturday they begin their season against the always tough Middlebury squad. We wish them luck!

Recently, I reviewed a fine book about football and education by English professor (and former second string linebacker) Mark Edmundson. I cross-post it here with the HuffingtonPost.

Mark Edmundson is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Virginia, the author of many learned essays and important books. He can talk about Freud and Wittgenstein, Homer and Emerson, and he has eloquently written about the importance of teaching and reading. But as he has reflected on the basic elements of his own identity, of his character, he has come to think that it was football “that became the prototype for every endeavor in later life that required lonely, difficult work.” “Football,” he writes “was going to educate me into becoming myself.”

As is the case for so many modern American men, Edmundson’s “education in the game” began by watching it played on television with his dad. Fathers and their kids have often grown closest by joining in an activity that requires little eye contact. Watching those afternoon games together, digesting those expressions of paternal admiration and contempt, this was Sunday school for millions of children. Edmundson beautifully evokes the rituals of smokes, drinks and snacks that went into a workingman’s preparation for the game: “through football my father explained the world to me.”

Halfway through high school Edmundson decided to try to play, curious to see how he would look in the pads, the helmet, the uniform. Taking to the field (twice daily) in August is tough on anybody, and for him it was grueling. Not being much of an athlete, he realized that nobody thought he would survive the training. The low expectations of others fueled his efforts. He couldn’t see much without his glasses, and he couldn’t run too fast even without the heavy pads, but somehow he found a way to build himself – body and spirit – into someone who belonged on the team. In his working class town of Medford, Massachusetts this conveyed some status. More importantly, it provided authentic community.

Edmundson, insightful reader of Freud that he is, is very ambivalent about the nature of this community. On the one hand, it promotes loyalty and courage, discipline and focus. On the other hand, it promotes violence and rage, groupthink and misogyny. Some of the best pages in this book describe the motivations for throwing your body into the fray, of launching yourself into a hit that is bound to hurt. Does it take courage? Sure, but rage also helps.

Edmundson turns to Homer for a comparison. In the Iliad Hector is a great warrior, a man of virtue and courage. He can “turn it off” when the battle is over. Not so Achilles, whose rage spills from war into everything else. It is, of course, Achilles who triumphs over Hector, but rage will exact its toll.

Some football coaches are particularly good at tapping into the passions of the young men in their charge. Locker-room anger at some perceived slight can lead to productive fury on the field. Edmundson discovers how to enrage himself by conjuring up memories of insults and offenses — all those folks who didn’t think he’d ever be able to hold his own. But the most powerful wrath comes from remembering the losses that cut the deepest.

And Mark Edmundson’s family had losses most difficult to bear. His father’s childhood scars of abandonment were profound, and then the family suffered the death of Mark’s little sister, Barbara Ann. Dad drank even more and stayed away from time to time; but he held it together. Mom sank into her grief for long periods, but she, too, found the resources of resilience and faith to carry on. Edmundson cites Freud on the work of mourning, and his folks worked to keep the family together. “How do you get from grief to some kind of gain? …Work lets you mourn the loss and put it behind you.” Edmundson was ostensibly writing about football there, but it may have been even more relevant to his parents. When he went to comfort his mother, she would simply reply: “I’m sad about the baby. There’s nothing you can do.”

There may have been nothing he was able to do at home, but he did learn to build himself through discipline, exercise and practice on the football field. Edmundson found a new brotherhood in his teammates, and they had many lessons to teach one another. He participated with fervor, but he was both in and out of the game, a “semi-outsider.” This status allows him real insight into the group dynamics. The game is certainly brutal at times, but it is also “beautiful and daring”. The loyalty of the young men to one another is often admirable, but “at certain points a bunch of men together can stop being a group and become something like a pack.” “Anyone,” Edmundson writes, “can see they are dangerous.”

And this is what Edmundson wants to emphasize to his readers about football. It’s so risky because the efforts and emotions it conjures up are so real. Playing the game with your teammates requires enormous effort; the work leads you to become better than you had ever been before. The personal losses you bring to the field don’t disappear, but your relationship to them can change. Experiencing that change, that effort to perfect oneself, is transformative. But calling up the resentments and the rage, calling to mind life’s losses to fuel one’s own violent energies is corrosive, too.

Playing a sport like football teaches you how to “summon the beast.” But growing up means learning what to do with those passions after the end of the fourth quarter. Edmundson’s “education in the game” has been so potent because he hasn’t left its lessons on the field.

This book certainly enriches one’s sense of a game that enthralls millions of Americans with its violence and its grace. It also reminds us of how the risks and rewards of athletics can be integrated with an education for life. And so the season begins!

Over the summer I finished a short book called Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. It will be published in the spring. I also reviewed two interesting books on American higher education, one that focused on teaching and the other providing a broad overview of the sector. You can find my review of Why Teach? here, and of Higher Education in America, from yesterday’s Washington Post, below.

Today classes begin, and I am delighted to head back to the classroom. Last night we heard some of the amazingly talented students who sing a capella at Wes, and now we are finishing our syllabi and checking our reserve readings. I am teaching the Past on Film and am looking forward to meeting the students.

American higher education is the envy of the world. Students flock to this country from all over, and the most highly ranked schools tend to be here. We should be proud!

American higher education is a mess. With high costs, low graduation rates, unhappy faculty members and coddled students, our universities are about to be radically disrupted by massive, technologically driven change. A good thing, too!

How to reconcile these opposing views? At a time when ambitious business-school professors and salivating entrepreneurs predict the end of the university as we know it, and at a time when we have never been more in need of an educated workforce and citizenry, the task of understanding the evolving mission and performance of American higher education has never been more urgent. Thank goodness Derek Bok, a two-time president of Harvard and a judicious, learned analyst of education, has taken on this undertaking. His book is too long to be called a report card, but it is a detailed progress report on the challenges and opportunities facing our nation’s colleges and universities.

One of the first things to note about higher ed in the United States is its heterogeneity. The problems of Harvard are not the same as the problems of the University of Texas or those of Scripps College in California or of LaGuardia Community College in New York. Bok tries to address schools in all their multiplicity, and his book suffers somewhat from the clunkiness that also characterizes higher ed. The book’s five sections discuss instruction from undergraduate to graduate and professional schools, as well as the market forces at work at each level. After the introduction, there are five forewords and four afterwords — not including the short final chapter called “The Last Word.” Yet one forgives redundancies because of the thoroughness of the research and the measured judgment consistently applied.

After noting the variety in higher ed, Bok acknowledges the extraordinary inequalities in the sector. Public discussion of education often focuses on the schools most difficult to get into, but “no more than two hundred colleges regularly reject more students than they admit.” At most highly selective schools (such as the one at which I am president), students receive some subsidy from the institution — even those paying full tuition. Students enrolled at less-selective schools get a small fraction of that support. Public institutions have seen dramatic reductions in state support for universities, and many flagship campuses are scrambling for donations and out-of-state, full-tuition-paying students. Community colleges enroll dramatically more people than other parts of the sector, but most of these students will never earn a degree.

Bok shows that the current quip that universities haven’t changed their teaching styles since the Middle Ages is just an empty canard. Universities have adapted surprisingly well to massive changes in technology, in demography and in developing streams of support. But Bok is no Pollyana, emphasizing that “universities have been especially slow to act . . . in improving the quality of undergraduate education.” Professors often confuse their desire to teach what interests them the most with what undergrads need to learn, and students in recent years are spending far less time on their studies than in past generations. Bok shows how schools cater to students in order to attract more of them, often with little attention to how campus amenities provide distractions from studying.

Bok knows the governance structures of universities as well as anyone, and he realizes that true curricular reform has to be led by the faculty. The challenge, from his perspective, is to make the faculty (at least its leadership) more aware of the empirical work on student learning that has been done over the past decade. Professors may be focused on their research and distracted by committee work, but the evidence shows that they care deeply about teaching effectiveness.

“The key to educational reform,” Bok writes, “lies in gathering evidence that will convince faculty that current teaching methods are not accomplishing the results that the professors assume are taking place.” Once the teachers understand the need for change, they will rise to the occasion and create classes that are more effective at developing the capacities that most agree are essential in college graduates. They have done so in the past, and they will do so again.

Bok’s confidence in the faculty is characteristic of his approach in this book. He believes that our varied system of higher education is very much capable of self-correction. Do we need to bend the cost curve? Sure, and that is why experiments such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) are so interesting (and mostly led by university veterans). Is there a liberal bias on our campuses? Sure, and it has been there at least since the 1940s, but faculty members realize they need more political diversity. Do university leaders spend too much time raising money? Sure, but American schools — especially the selective ones — get much more support than schools in other countries. We may have the worst system, he jokes, but like democracy, it’s better than all the alternatives.

Bok underscores two areas in urgent need of improvement: increasing the percentage of students who graduate from college and improving the quality of undergraduate education. We must do a better job attracting low-income students to our best colleges and universities, no longer wasting financial aid on wealthy students with high SAT scores to improve an institution’s place in bogus rankings. We must also do a better job of stimulating curricular reform and assessment so as to be sure students are working hard to learn what they need to know — whether at a community college or a research university. Of course, reaching agreement on what students need to know is a great challenge, but that’s the core of the faculty’s responsibility.

Competition among schools produces benefits and causes problems. Most of the important ones are addressed in Bok’s helpful volume. I hope he is right that we already have the ingredients in place to make the necessary reforms. I know we need university leaders like him to help activate those ingredients so that American higher education can continue to contribute in vital ways to our culture, our economy and our polity.

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What an incredible battle! Couldn't be more proud of our team for the fight, grit, and tenacity they showed. Tough, tough loss...but we'll be back! Thanks to all who followed along this season. #RollCards#proud

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